Elizabeth Fox-Genovese: Paternalism’s Daughter by Deborah A. Symonds

Reviewed by: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese: Paternalism’s Daughter by Deborah A. Symonds Louise M. Newman Elizabeth Fox-Genovese: Paternalism’s Daughter. By Deborah A. Symonds. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2021. Pp. xviii, 339. $39.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-4513-2.) This is a wonderful book, authored by one of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s former graduate students and written for insiders—those among us who knew [End Page 193] Betsey or knew of her reputation as an imperious public historian. Deborah A. Symonds’s Elizabeth Fox-Genovese: Paternalism’s Daughter is intent on transforming its subject into a person with whom we can deeply empathize. Readers are given a clear view of Fox-Genovese’s early struggles to maintain her intellectual independence and sense of well-being—initially in the face of her father’s authoritarianism and then during graduate school at Harvard University, where she struggled to find a voice independent of, and yet equal to, the professorial and paternal forces on whose guidance she relied. Her intellectual trajectory, from “prerevolutionary France toward the antebellum South, from economic to women’s history, and from the study of agriculture and merchant capitalism to the examination of literary and autobiographical texts,” is illuminated in great detail (p. 190). All of this intellectual history is mixed up with glimpses into her marriage to the prominent Marxist historian Eugene D. Genovese and insightful analyses of her severe health issues: anorexia nervosa in her young adulthood and multiple sclerosis and spinal stenosis later in her life (she died in 2007 at age sixty-five). Meeting Genovese sometime in late 1968 and marrying him in June 1969 changed her trajectory dramatically, freeing her from her past and helping her establish an academic career at a time when it was difficult for women to do so. As Symonds puts it, Betsey found Gene “at the right moment,” and his impact was life-affirming—“initiating her into a world where writing could replace not eating as a means of liking oneself” (p. 99). The book, divided into three main parts, proceeds chronologically. Part 1, “Family and Upbringing,” explores the lives of Fox-Genovese’s parents and grandparents in the 1920s and 1930s, before examining her childhood in the 1940s and 1950s. Part 2, “Intellectual Orienteering with Freud and Marx,” looks at her early career (from 1969 to 1986), ending with her becoming a prominent scholar in women’s studies and southern history at Binghamton University and then at Emory University, where Fox-Genovese finished writing Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill, 1988) and began an intellectual journey that led her to “abandon history for a time to take up the life of a public intellectual, tangle with feminism, . . . and discard Freud to become a Catholic and an advocate for unborn children” (p. 179). Part 3, “Refashionings,” spanning the years from 1986 to 2007, examines her political turn to the right, which Symonds explains by pointing to Fox-Genovese’s abiding hatred of individualism in all its guises, most especially liberal feminism, and her championing new “outcasts” as the decades unfolded (p. 1). This marvelously rich book would not have been possible without the archive that Fox-Genovese herself carefully assembled for the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which includes personal journals as well as letters from colleagues, former students, and family members. And of course, there are Fox-Genovese’s voluminous published works, which span “2 million–plus words over three-plus decades” (p. xiv). But what makes this biography so valuable is its representation of Fox-Genovese as “a rich example of a post–World War II, Western, privileged psychologically fraught woman’s striving to . . . escape the paternalisms of her education and culture while reclaiming them” [End Page 194] (p. 276). Symonds concludes by saying that Fox-Genovese’s work deserves better than to join “the dustbins and footnotes where [most of us] old scholars go” (p. 276). This exquisite biography might yet succeed in forestalling such a fate just a little bit longer. Louise M. Newman University of Florida Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association